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In the Age of Trump, the idea of discussing policy seems rather hopeless. What is the point
of trying to, say, identify the best way to untangle the mess of Obamacare subsidy formulas
when Donald Trump and the Republicans are slashing funding for the program, not to
mention tearing the entire government to ribbons? “What can men do against such
reckless hate?”
This surely explains why policy gets so much less broad attention than it did in 2019, when
the nitty-gritty details of Medicare for All were the subject of heated debate between sundry
centrist “fact-checkers” and leftists. Trump is in power, and no argument has ever
convinced that man of anything, not least because when you start talking about anything
remotely complicated, he wanders off and starts watching television.
Still, government policy always matters, and we at the Prospect have been grimly soldiering
on trying to investigate the manifold consequences of Mad King Trump—as well as
pondering what to do in the future, with our new Big Ideas series.
In that latter vein, Common Wealth, a relatively new lefty think tank based in both Britain
and the US, has been attempting to dial up their ambition both to account for the yawning
abyss that Trump is tearing in the American social fabric, and also the policy failures that
enabled his rise.
Common Wealth’s focus is on public ownership, public provision, and building state
capacity. The first reason for this is simple reality: Despite the utter madness of what
Trump is doing, the mess is going to have to be cleaned up. A future Democratic president,
should there ever be one, will have no choice but to rebuild much of the entire
administrative state from scratch—they might as well build it back better, to coin a phrase.
“We’re in a moment where things feel really perilous politically,” said Common Wealth’s
US Programme Director Melanie Brusseler, “but also there's a lot of hope in response.”
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